Soldier, ask not

Chapter 3

I remember I did not want to wake up. It seemed to me I had been on a far voyage, that I had been away a long time. But when, at last, reluctantly, I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the chamber and only Lisa Kant was bending over me. Some of the others in our party had not yet finished turning around to see what had happened to me.

Lisa was raising my head from the floor.

"You heard!" she was saying, urgently and low-voiced, almost in my ear. "What did you hear?"

"Hear?" I shook my head, dazedly, remembering at that, and almost expecting to hear that uncountable horde of voices flooding back in on me. But there was only silence now, and Lisa's question. "Hear?" I said, " - them."

"Them?"

I blinked my eyes up at her and abruptly my mind cleared. All at once, I remembered my sister Eileen; and I scrambled to my feet, staring off into the distance at the entrance by which I had seen her standing with the man in black. But the entrance and the space about it was empty. The two of them, together - they were gone.

I scrambled to my feet. Shaken, battered, torn loose from my roots of self-confidence by that mighty cataract of voices in which I had been plunged and carried away, the mystery and disappearance of my sister shook me now out of all common sense. I did not answer Lisa, but started at a run down the ramp for the entrance where I had last seen Eileen talking to the stranger in black.

Fast as I was, with my longer legs, Lisa was faster. Even in the blue robes, she was as swift as a track star. She caught up with me, passed me and swung around to bar the entrance as I reached it.

"Where are you going?" she cried. "You can't leave - just yet! If you heard something, I've got to take you to see Mark Torre himself! He has to talk to anyone who ever hears anything!"

I hardly heard her.

"Get out of my way," I muttered, and I pushed her aside, not gently. I plunged on through the entrance into the circular equipment room beyond the entrance. There were technicians at work in their colored smocks, doing incomprehensible things to inconceivable tangles of metal and glass - but no sign of Eileen, or the man in black.

I raced through the room into the corridor beyond. But that, too, was empty. I ran down the corridor and turned right into the first doorway I came to. From desks and tables a few people, reading and transcribing, looked up at me in wonder, but Eileen and the stranger were not among them. I tried another room and another, all without success.

At the fifth room, Lisa caught up with me again.

"Stop!" she said. And this time she took actual hold of me, with a strength that was astonishing for a girl no larger than she was. "Will you stop? And think for a moment? What's the matter?"

"Matter!" I shouted. "My sister..." and then I stopped. I checked my tongue. All at once it swept over me how foolish it would sound if I told Lisa the object of my search. A seventeen-year-old girl talking to, and even going off from a group with, someone her older brother does not know, is hardly good reason for a wild chase and a frantic search - at least in this day and age. And I was not of any mind to rehearse for Lisa's benefit the cold unhappiness of our upbringing, Eileen's and mine, in the house of my uncle Mathias.

I stood silent.

"You have to come with me," she said urgently after a second. "You don't know how terribly, inconceivably rare it is when someone actually hears something at the Transit Point. You don't know how much it means now to Mark Torre - to Mark Torre, himself - to find someone who's heard!"

I shook my head numbly. I had no wish to talk to anyone about what I had just been through, and least of all to be examined like some freak experimental specimen.

"You have to!" repeated Lisa. "It means so much. Not just to Mark, to the whole project. Think! Don't just run off! Think about what you're doing first!"

The word "think" got through to me. Slowly my mind cleared. It was quite true what she said. I should think instead of running around like someone out of his wits. Eileen and the black-dressed stranger could be in any one of dozens of rooms or corridors - they could even be on their way out of the Project and the Enclave completely. Besides, what would I have said if I had caught up with them, anyway? Demand that the man identify himself and state his intentions toward my sister? It was probably lucky I had not been able to find them.

Besides, there was something else. I had worked hard to get the contract I had signed three days ago, just out of the University, with the Interstellar News Services. But I had a far way to go yet, to the place of my ambitions. For what I had wanted - so long and so fiercely that it was as if the want was something live with claws and teeth tearing inside me - was freedom. Real freedom, of the kind possessed only by members of planetary governments - and one special group, the working Guild members of the Interstellar News Services. Those workers in the communications field who had signed their oath of nonallegiance and were technically people without a world, in guarantee of the impartiality of the News Services they operated.

For the inhabited worlds of the human race were split - as they had been split for two hundred years now - into two camps, one which held their populations to ''tight'' contracts and the other who believed in the so-called loose contract. Those on the tight-contract side were the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association, Newton, Cassida and Venus, and the big new world of Ceta under Tau Ceti. On the loose side were ranged Earth, the Dorsai, the Exotic worlds of Mara and Kultis, New Earth, Freiland, Mars and the small Catholic world of St. Marie.

What divided them was a conflict of economic systems - an inheritance of the divided Earth that had originally colonized them. For in our day interplanetary currency was only one thing - and that was the coin of highly trained minds.

The race was now too big for a single planet to train all of its own specialists, particularly when other worlds produced better. Not the best education Earth or any other world could provide could produce a professional soldier to match those turned out by the Dorsai. There were no physicists like the physicists from Newton, no psychologists like those from the Exotics, no conscript hired troops as cheap and careless of casualty losses as those from Harmony and Association - and so on. Consequently, a world trained one kind or type of professional and traded his services by contract to another world for the contract and services of whatever type of other professional the world needed.

And the division between the two camps of worlds was stark. On the "loose" worlds a man's contract belonged in part to him; and he could not be sold or traded to another world without his own consent - except in a case of extreme importance or emergency. On the "tight" worlds the individual lived at the orders of his authorities - his contract might be sold or traded at a moment's notice. When this happened, he had only one duty - and that was to go and work where he was ordered.

So, on all the worlds, there were the non-free and the partly free. On the loose worlds, of which as I say Earth was one, people like myself were partly free. But I wanted full freedom, of the sort only available to me as a Guild member. Once accepted into the Guild, this freedom would be mine. For the contract for my services would belong to the News Services, itself, during the rest of my lifetime.

No world after that would be able to judge me or sell my services, against my will, to some other planet to which it owed a deficit of trained personnel. It was true that Earth, unlike Newton, Cassida, Ceta and some of the others, was proud of the fact that it had never needed to trade off its university graduates in blocks for people with the special trainings of the younger worlds. But, like all the planets, Earth held the right to do so if it should ever become necessary - and there were plenty of stories of individual instances.

So, my goal and my hunger for freedom, which the years under the roof of Mathias had nourished in me, could be filled only by acceptance into the News Services. And in spite of my scholastic record, good as it was, that was still a far, hard, chancy goal to reach. I would need to overlook nothing that could help me to it; and it came to me now that refusing to see Mark Torre might well be to throw away a chance at such help.

"You're right," I said to Lisa. "I'll go and see him. Of course. I'll see him. Where do I go?"

"I'll take you," she answered. "Just let me phone ahead." She went a few steps away from me and spoke quietly into the small phone on her ring finger. Then she came back and led me off.

"What about the others?" I asked, suddenly remembering the rest of our party back in the Index Room.

"I've asked someone else to take them over for the rest of the tour," Lisa answered without looking at me. "This way."

She led me through a doorway off the hall and into a small light-maze. For a moment this surprised me and then I realized that Mark Torre, like anyone in the public eye constantly, would need protection from possibly dangerous crackpots and cranks. We came out of the maze into a small empty room, and stopped.

The room moved - in what direction, I could not say - and then stopped.

"This way," said Lisa again, leading me to one of the walls of the room. At her touch, a section of it folded back and let us into a room furnished like a study, but equipped with a control desk, behind which sat an elderly man. It was Mark Torre, as I had often seen him pictured in the news.

He was not as old in appearance as his age might have made him appear - he was past eighty at the time - but his face was gray and sick-looking. His clothes sat loosely on his big bones, as if he had weighed more once than he did now. His two really extraordinarily large hands lay limply on the little flat space before the console keys, their gray knuckles swollen and enlarged by what I later learned was an obscure disease of the joints called arthritis.

He did not get up when we came in, but his voice was surprisingly clear and young when he spoke and his eyes glowed at me with something like scarcely contained joy. Still he made us sit and wait, until after a few minutes another door to the room opened and there came in a middle-aged man from one of the Exotic worlds - an Exotic-born, with penetrating hazel-colored eyes in his smooth, unlined face under close-cropped white hair, and dressed in blue robes like those Lisa was wearing.

"Mr. Olyn," said Mark Torre, "this is Padma, OutBond from Mara to the St. Louis Enclave. He already knows who you are."

"How do you do?" I said to Padma. He smiled.

"An honor to meet you, Tam Olyn," he said and sat down. His light, hazel-colored eyes did not seem to stare at me in any way - and yet, at the same time, they made me uneasy. There was no strangeness about him - that was the trouble. His gaze, his voice, even the way he sat, seemed to imply that he knew me already as well as anyone could, and better than I would want anyone to know me, whom I did not know as well in return.

For all that I had argued for years against everything my uncle stood for, at that moment I felt the fact of Mathias' bitterness against the peoples of the younger worlds lift its head also inside me, and snarl against the implied superiority in Padma, OutBond from Mara to the Enclave at St. Louis, on Earth. I wrenched my gaze away from him and looked back at the more human, Earth-born eyes of Mark Torre.

"Now that Padma's here," the old man said, leaning forward eagerly toward me over the keys of his control console, "what was it like? Tell us what you heard!"

I shook my head, because there was no good way of describing it as it really had been. Billions of voices, speaking at once, and all distinct, are impossible.

"I heard voices," I said. "All talking at the same time - but separate."

"Many voices?" asked Padma.

I had to look at him again.

"All the voices there are," I heard myself answering. And I tried to describe it. Padma nodded; but, as I talked I looked back at Torre, and saw him sinking into his seat away from me, as if in confusion or disappointment.

"Only . . . voices?" the old man said, half to himself when I was done.

"Why?" I asked, pricked into a little anger. "What was I supposed to hear? What do people usually hear?"

"It's always different," put in the voice of Padma soothingly from the side of my vision. But I would not look at him. I kept my eyes on Mark Torre. "Everyone hears different things."

I turned to Padma at that.

"What did you hear?" I challenged. He smiled a little sadly.

"Nothing, Tam," he said.

"Only people who are Earth-born have ever heard anything," said Lisa sharply, as if I should know this without needing to be told.

"You?" I stared at her.

"Me! Of course not!" she replied. "There's not half a dozen people since the Project started who've ever heard anything."

"Less than half a dozen?" I echoed.

"Five," she said. "Mark is one, of course. Of the other four, one is dead and the other three" - she hesitated, staring at me - "weren't fit."

There was a different note to her voice that I heard now for the first time. But I forgot it entirely as, abruptly, the figures she had mentioned struck home.

Five people only, in forty years! Like a body blow the message jarred me that what had happened to me in the Index Room was no small thing; and that this moment with Torre and Padma was not small either, for them as well as myself.

"Oh?" I said; and I looked at Torre. With an effort, I made my voice casual. "What does it mean, then, when someone hears something?"

He did not answer me directly. Instead he leaned forward with his dark old eyes beginning to shine brilliantly again, and stretched out the fingers of his large right hand to me.

"Take hold," he said.

I reached out in my turn and took his hand, feeling his swollen knuckles under my grasp. He gripped my hand hard and held on, staring at me for a long moment, while slowly the brilliance faded and finally went out; and then he let go, sinking back into his chair as if defeated.

"Nothing," he said dully, turning to Padma. "Still - nothing. You'd think he'd feel something - or I would."

"Still," said Padma, quietly, looking at me, "he heard."

He fastened me to my chair with his hazel-colored Exotic eyes.

"Mark is disturbed, Tam," he said, "because what you experienced was only voices, with no overburden of message or understanding."

"What message?" I demanded. "What kind of understanding?''

"That," said Padma, "you'd have to tell us." His glance was so bright on me that I felt uncomfortable, like a bird, an owl, pinned by a searchlight. I felt the hackles of my anger rising in resentment.

"What's this all got to do with you, anyway?" I asked.

He smiled a little.

"Our Exotic funds," he said, "bear most of the financial support of the Encyclopedia Project. But you must understand, it's not our Project. It's Earth's. We only feel a responsibility toward all work concerned with the understanding of Man by man, himself. Moreover, between our philosophy and Mark's there's a disagreement."

"Disagreement?" I said. I had a nose for news even then, fresh out of college, and that nose twitched.

But Padma smiled as if he read my mind.

"It's nothing new," he said. "A basic disagreement we've had from the start. Put briefly, and somewhat crudely, we on the Exotics believe that Man is improvable. Our friend Mark, here, believes that Earth man - Basic Man - is already improved, but hasn't been able to uncover his improvement yet and use it."

I stared at him.

"What's that got to do with me?" I asked. "And with what I heard?"

"It's a question of whether you can be useful to him - or to us," answered Padma calmly; and for a second my heart chilled. For if either the Exotics or someone like Mark Torre should put in a demand for my contract from the Earth government, I might as well kiss good-bye all hopes of working my way eventually into the News Services Guild.

"Not to either of you - I think," I said, as indifferently as I could.

"Perhaps. We'll see," said Padma. He held up his hand and extended upward his index finger. "Do you see this finger, Tam?"

I looked at it; and as I looked - suddenly it rushed toward me, growing enormously, blocking out the sight of everything else in the room. For the second time that afternoon, I left the here and now of the real universe for a place of unreality.

Suddenly, I was encompassed by lightnings. I was in darkness but thrown about by lightning strokes - in some vast universe where I was tossed light-years in distance, first this way and then that, as part of some gigantic struggle.

At first I did not understand it, the struggle. Then slowly I woke to the feet that all the lashing of the lightnings was a furious effort for survival and victory in answer to an attempt by the surrounding, ancient, ever-flowing darkness, to quench and kill the lightnings. Nor was this any random battle. Now I saw how there was ambush and defeat, stratagem and tactic, blow and counterblow, between the lightning and the dark.

Then, in that moment, came the memory of the sound of the billions of voices, welling up around me once more in rhythm to the lightnings, to give me the key to what I saw. All at once, in the way a real lightning-flash suddenly reveals in one glimpse all the land for miles around, in a flash of intuition I understood what surrounded me.

It was the centuries-old battle of man to keep his race alive and push forward into the future, the ceaseless, furious struggle of that beastlike, god-like-primitive, sophisticated-savage and civilized-composite organism that was the human race fighting to endure and push onward. Onward, and up, and up again, until the impossible was achieved, all barriers were broken, all pains conquered, all abilities possessed. Until all was lightning and no darkness left.

It was the voices of this continuing struggle down the hundreds of centuries that I had heard in the Index Room. It was this same struggle that the Exotics were attempting to encompass with their strange magics of the psychological and philosophical sciences. This struggle that the Final Encyclopedia was designed at last to chart throughout the past centuries of human existence, so that Man's path might be calculated meaningfully into his future.

This was what moved Padma, and Mark Torre - and everyone, including myself. For each human being was caught up in the struggling mass of his fellows and could not avoid the battle of life. Each of us living at this moment was involved in it, as its parts and its plaything.

But with that thought, suddenly, I became conscious that I was different, not just a plaything of this battle. I was something more-potentially an involved power in it, a possible lord of its actions. For the first time, then, I laid hands on the lightnings about me and began to try to drive, to turn and direct their movements, forcing them to my own ends and desires.

Still, I was flung about for unguessable distances. But no longer like a ship adrift upon a storm-wrenched sea, now like a ship close-hauled, using the wind to bear to windward. And in that moment for the first time it came upon me - the feeling of my own strength and power. For the lightnings bent at my grasp and their tossing shaped to my will. I felt it - that sensation of unchained power within me that is beyond description; and it came to me at last that indeed I had never been one of the tossed and buffeted ones. I was a rider, a Master. And I had it in me to shape at least part of all I touched in this battle between the lightnings and the dark.

Only then, at last, I became aware of rare others like myself. Like me they were riders and Masters. They, too, rode the storm that was the rest of the struggling mass of the human race. We would be flung together for a second, then torn measureless eons apart in the next moment. But I saw them. And they saw me. And I became conscious of the fact that they were calling to me, calling on me, not to fight for myself alone, but to join with them in some common effort to bring the whole battle to some future conclusion and order out of chaos.

But everything that was inherent in me rebelled against their call. I had been downtrodden and confounded too long.. I had been the lightnings' helplessly buffeted subject for too long. Now I had won to the wild joy of riding where I had been ridden, and I gloried in my power. I did not want the common effort that might lead at last to peace, but only that the intoxicating whirl and surge and conflict should go on with me, like a fury, riding the breast of it. I had been chained and enslaved by my uncle's darkness but now I was free and a Master. Nothing should bring me to put on chains again. I stretched out my grasp on the lightnings and felt that grasp move wider and grow stronger, wider and stronger yet.

Abruptly, I was back in the office of Mark Torre.

Mark, his aging face set like wood, stared at me. Whitefaced, Lisa also stared in my direction. But, directly before me, Padma sat looking into my eyes with no more expression than he had shown before.

"No," he said, slowly. "You're right, Tam. You can't be any help here on the Encyclopedia."

There was a faint sound from Lisa, a little gasp, almost a tiny cry of pain. But it was drowned in a grunt from Mark Torre, like the grunt of a mortally wounded bear, cornered at last, but turning to raise up on his hind legs and face his attackers.

"Can't?" he said. He had straightened up behind his desk and now he turned to Padma. His swollen right hand was cramped into a great, gray fist on the table. "He must - he has to be! It's been twenty years since anyone heard anything in the Index Room - and I'm getting old!"

"All he heard was the voices; and they touched no special spark in him. You felt nothing when you touched him," said Padma. He spoke softly and distantly, the words coming out one by one, like soldiers marching under orders. "It's because there's nothing there. No identity in him with his fellow-man. He has all the machinery, but no empathy - no power source hooked to it."

"You can fix him! Damn it" - the old man's voice rang like a steeple bell, but it was hoarse to the point of tears - "on the Exotics you can heal him!" Padma shook his head.

"No," he said. "No one can help him but himself. He's not ill or crippled. He's only failed to develop. Once, some time when he was young, he must have turned away from people into some dark, solitary valley of his own, and over the years that valley's grown deeper and darker and more narrow, until now no one can get down there beside him to help him through it. No other mind could go through it and survive - maybe even his can't. But until he does and comes out the other end, he's no good to you or the Encyclopedia; and all it represents for men on Earth and elsewhere. Not only is he no good, he wouldn't take your job if you offered it to him. Look at him."

The pressure of his gaze all this time, the low, steady utterance of his words, like small stones dropped one after the other into a calm, but bottomless pool of water, had held me paralyzed even while he talked about me as if I were not there. But with his last three words, the pressure from him let up; and I found myself free to speak.

"You hypnotized me!" I flung at him. "I didn't give you any permission to put me under - to psychoanalyze me!"

Padma shook his head.

"No one hypnotized you," he answered. "I just opened a window for you to your own inner awareness. And I didn't psychoanalyze you."

"Then what was it-" I checked myself, abruptly wary.

"Whatever you saw and felt," he said, "were your own awarenesses and feelings translated into your own symbols. And what those were I've no idea - and no way of finding out, unless you tell me."

"Then how did you make up your mind to whatever it was you decided here?" I snarled at him.

"You decided it fast enough. How'd you find out whatever it was made you decide?''

"From you," he answered. "Your looks, your actions, your voice as you talk to me now. A dozen other unconscious signals. These tell me, Tam. A human being communicates with his whole body and being, not just his voice, or his facial expression."

"I don't believe it!" I flared - and then my fury suddenly cooled as caution came on me with the certainty that indeed there must be grounds, even if I could not figure them out at the moment, for my not believing it. "I don't believe it," I repeated, more calmly and coldly. "There had to be more going into your decision than that."

"Yes," he said. "Of course. I had a chance to check the records here. Your personal history, like that of everyone Earthborn who's alive at this moment, is already in the Encyclopedia. I looked at that before I came in."

"More," I said grimly, for I felt I had him on the run now. "There was more to it even than that. I can tell. I know it!"

"Yes," answered Padma and breathed out softly. "Having been through this much, you'd know it, I suppose. In any case, you'd learn it soon enough by yourself." He lifted his eyes to focus squarely on mine, but this time I found myself facing him without any feeling of inferiority.

"It happens, Tam," he said, "that you're what we call an Isolate, a rare pivotal force in the shape of a single individual - a pivotal force in the evolving pattern of human society, not just on Earth, but on all the sixteen worlds, in their road to Man's future.

You're a man with a terrible capability for affecting that future - for good or ill."

At his words my hands remembered the feel of their grasp on the lightning; and I waited, holding my breath to hear more. But he did not go on.

"And-" I prompted harshly, at last.

"There is no 'and,' " said Padma. "That's all there is to it. Have you ever heard of ontogenetics?"

I shook my head.

"It's a name for one of our Exotic calculative techniques," he said. "Briefly, there's a continually evolving pattern of events in which all living human beings are caught up. In mass, the strivings and desires of these individuals determine the direction of growth of the pattern into the future. But, again as individuals only, nearly all people are more acted upon, than act effectively upon the pattern."

He paused, staring at me, as if asking me if I had understood him so far. I had understood - oh, I had understood. But I would not let him know that.

"Go on," I said.

"Only now and then, in the case of some rare individual," he continued, "do we find a particular combination of factors - of character and the individual's position within the pattern - that combined make him inconceivably more effective than his fellows. When this happens, as in your case, we have an Isolate, a pivotal character, one who has great freedom to act upon the pattern, while being acted upon only to a relatively small degree, himself."

He stopped again. And this time he folded his hands. The gesture was final and I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart.

"So," I said. "I've got all this - and still you don't want me for whatever it is you want me?"

"Mark wants you to take over from him, eventually, as Controller, building the Encyclopedia," said Padma. "So do we, on the Exotics. For the Encyclopedia is such a device that its full purpose and use, when completed, can only be conceived of by rare individuals; and that conception can only be continually translated into common terms, by a unique individual. Without Mark, or someone like him to see its construction through at least until it is moved into space, the common run of humanity will lose the vision of the Encyclopedia's capabilities when it's finished. The work on it will run into misunderstandings and frustrations. It will slow down, finally stall, and then fall apart."

He paused and looked at me, almost grimly.

"It will never be built," he said, "unless a successor for Mark is found. And without it, Earth-born man may dwindle and die. And if Earth-born man goes, the human strains of the younger worlds may not be viable. But none of this matters to you, does it? Because it's you who don't want us, not the other way around."

He stared across the room with eyes that burned with a hazel flame against me.

"You don't want us," he repeated slowly. "Do you, Tam?"

I shook off the impact of his gaze. But in the same moment I understood what he was driving at, and knew he was right. In that same moment I had seen myself seated in the chair at the console before me, chained there by a sense of duty for the rest of my days. No, I did not want them, or their works, on Encyclopedia or anywhere else. I wanted none of it.

Had I worked this hard, this long, to escape Mathias, only to throw everything aside and become a slave to helpless people - all those in that great mass of the human race who were too weak to fight the lightning for themselves? Should I give up the prospect of my own power and freedom to work for the misty promise of freedom for them, someday - for them, who could not earn that freedom for themselves, as I could earn my own, and had? No, I would not - I would not, I would have no part of them, of Torre or his Encyclopedia!

"No!" I said harshly. And Mark Torre made a faint, rattling sound deep in his throat, like a dying echo of the wounded grunt he had given earlier.

"No. That's right," said Padma, nodding. "You see, as I said, you've got no empathy - no soul."

"Soul?" I said. "What's that?"

"Can I describe the color of gold to a man blind from birth?" His eyes were brilliant upon me. "You'll know it if you find it - but you'll find it only if you can fight your way through that valley I mentioned. If you come through that, finally, then maybe you'll find your human soul. You'll know it when you find it."

"Valley," I echoed, at last. "What valley?"

"You know, Tam," said Padma more quietly. "You know, better than I do. That valley of the mind and spirit where all the unique creativity in you is now turned-warped and twisted-toward destruction."

'DESTRUCT!"

There it thundered, in the voice of my uncle, ringing in the ear of my memory, quoting, as Mathias always did, from the writings of Walter Blunt. Suddenly, as if printed in fiery letters on the inner surface of my skull, I saw the power and possibilities of that word to me, on the path I wanted to travel.

And without warning, in my mind's eye, it was as if the valley of which Padma had been speaking became real around me. High black walls rose on either side of me. Straight ahead was my route and narrow - and downward. Abruptly, I was afraid, as of something at the deepest depth, unseen in the farther darkness beyond, some blacker-than-black stirring of amorphous life that lay in wait for me there.

But, even as I shuddered away from this, from somewhere inside me a great, shadowy, but terrible joy swelled up at the thought of meeting it. While, as if from a great distance above me, like a weary bell, came the voice of Mark Torre sadly and hoarsely tolling at Padma.

"No chance for us, then? There's nothing at all we can do? What if he never comes back to us, and the Encyclopedia?"

"You can only wait - and hope he does," Padma's voice was answering. "If he can go on and down and through what he has created for himself, and survive, he may come back. But the choice has always been up to him, heaven or hell, as it is to all of us. Only his choices are greater than ours."

The words pattered like nonsense against my ears, like the sound of a little gust of cold rain against some unfeeling surface like stone or concrete. I felt suddenly a great need to get away from them all, to get off by myself and think. I climbed heavily to my feet.

"How do I get out of here?" I asked thickly.

"Lisa," said Mark Torre, sadly. I saw her get to her feet.

"This way," she said to me. Her face was pale but expressionless, facing me for a moment. Then she turned and went before me.

So she led me out of that room and back the way we had come. Down through the light-maze and the rooms and corridors of the Final Encyclopedia Project and at last to the outer lobby of the Enclave, where our group had first met her. All the way she did not say a word; but when I left her at last, she stopped me unexpectedly, with a hand on my arm. I turned back to face down at her.

"I'm always here," she said. And I saw to my astonishment that her brown eyes were brimming with tears. "Even if no one else is - I'm always here!"

Then she turned swiftly and almost ran off. I stared after her, unexpectedly shaken. But so much had happened to me in the past hour or so that I did not have the time or desire to try to discover why, or figure out what the girl could have meant by her strange words, echoing her strange words earlier.

I took the subway back into St. Louis and caught a shuttle flight back to Athens, thinking many things.

So wound up I was in my own thoughts that I entered my uncle's house and walked clear into its library before I was aware of people already there.

Not merely my uncle, seated in his high wing chair, with an old leather-bound book spread open, face down and ignored on his knees, and not only my sister, who had evidently returned before me, standing to one side and facing him, from about ten feet away.

Also in the room was a thin, dark young man some inches shorter than myself. The mark of his Berber ancestry was plain to anyone who, like myself, had been required in college to study ethnic origins. He was dressed all in black, his black hair was cut short above his forehead, and he stood like the upright blade of an unsheathed sword.

He was the stranger I had seen Eileen talking to at the Enclave. And the dark joy of the promised meeting in the valley's depths leaped up again in me. For here, waiting, without my need to summon it, was the first chance to put to use my newly discovered understanding and my strength.